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Markets: By the numbers

Thursday’s North American close

TSX
12,841.62 +4.91 +0.04%

Dow Jones
15,328.30 +55.04 +0.36%

S&P 500
1,698.67 +5.90 +0.35%

Nasdaq
3,787.43 +26.33 +0.70%

Fairfax Financial’s chief executive Prem Watsa insists he wants to keep BlackBerry in one piece and in Canadian hands. Watsa, who usually shies away from doing media interviews but has opened up after lukewarm market reaction to his firm’s US$4.7-billion bid, told the Associated Press that he has no interest in answering the calls from some corners to divvy up the smartphone maker’s assets as part of a deal. “Rest assured when we do this it won’t be done to split the company,” Watsa told the UK newspaper. “I mean one of the reasons I went on the board, and I said it publicly, was to keep the company in Canada and to make sure it survives and exists in Canada. It is one of Canada’s most successful companies. Companies do fall on hard times and they come back again and we expect this company to do the same.” Watsa echoed that confident tone in a separate interview with news agency Reuters, saying he believes the consortium he’s leading can find the money to fund its bid.“We wouldn’t put our name to such a high-profile deal if we didn’t feel confident that at the end of the day that our due diligence would be fine and we’d be able to finance it,” Watsa said. The Canadian-led consortium put in its $9 a share bid for BlackBerry on Monday, arguing that the firm had better chances as a private company, away from Wall Street’s constant gaze. But the shares closed a full dollar below the bid price on the Nasdaq on Wednesday, indicating that investors were skeptical the deal would succeed.

Canadian families spent an average of $185 per month on communications services in 2012, up from $181 in 2011, according to the latest monitoring report from Canada’s telecommunications regulator. The report, released Thursday, revealed that the communications industry as a whole generated more than $60-billion in revenues last year. The report from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission released every September offers a wealth of information on what Canadians watch and listen to, how they do it and how much they spend on it. This year’s report found Canadians listened to slightly less radio and watched a bit less television in 2012 than in previous years, but they watched more TV shows through the Internet and listened to more music through streaming services. The CRTC said spending was up on wireless data and Internet services with faster broadband speeds. Revenues for the overall communications industry grew 2.3% while the wireless industry, which accounts for about one third of overall spending and has been the focus of much public attention in recent months, grew at a pace of 6.5%. Read more on the report.

Huge untapped oil field discovered off Newfoundland’s coast . . . by a Norwegian company

Statoil, a Norwegian energy firm, is estimating that an untapped oil field off Canada’s east coast contains between 300 and 600 million barrels of recoverable oil, making it one of the biggest discoveries in recent years. “We believe this has the potential to open a new region offshore,” Bard Glad Pedersen, the firm’s director of communications, said in a telephone interview Thursday. “We will be working with our partners and authorities to enable a positive development for the companies and the region.” Calgary-based Husky Energy, another major producer in Newfoundland’s current offshore oilfields, is Statoil’s partner in the area, with a 35% working interest in three discoveries. “Together, these discoveries confirm significant opportunity in the Flemish Pass Basin and could be developed in tandem,” Husky said in a statement Thursday.

Small victory for Barrick

Barrick Gold Corp. has received a rare piece of good news from its troubled Pascua-Lama project, as Chile’s Supreme Court has upheld the miner’s environmental approval and rejected a proposal to permanently shut down the project. The move, which upholds a lower court ruling, ends a constitutional challenge that four indigenous communities filed against Pascua-Lama last year. It paves the way for Barrick to advance the project, which straddles the border between Chile and Argentina. However, Barrick still has a very difficult road ahead. The Chilean portion of Pascua-Lama was suspended back in April after authorities concluded that Barrick’s water management system did not meet the standards laid out in the company’s environmental permit. The company plans to complete the new system by the end of 2014 to satisfy regulators. In the meantime, Barrick has reduced capital spending at Pascua-Lama by US$1.5-billion to US$1.8-billion for 2013 and 2014.

Sick, tired and disgusted… of Canada’s telcos

Sick, tired and disgusted. Those are just a few of the adjectives used by Canadians to describe how they feel about the Big Three wireless providers’ aggressive advertising campaign this summer accusing the federal government of giving an unfair advantage to foreign providers looking to enter the Canadian market. Several letters to the CRTC obtained by Postmedia News under access-to-information law show the public’s displeasure with the “Fair for Canada” campaign by Bell, Rogers and Telus, which attempted to rally public opinion against the possible entry of a fourth major wireless carrier such as U.S. giant Verizon into Canada. The letters expressed little sympathy for the incumbents, citing a lack of competition in an industry where the largest three companies control about 85% of all wireless airwaves and consumers pay some of the world’s highest wireless rates. “I totally completely, 100% support Verizon and any other companies. I’m sick and tired of Bell, Rogers and Telus having the entire market share,” one person wrote to the CRTC, echoing several other similar submissions.

Canada’s export market isn’t broken, just bruised; and consumers aren’t spent out, it’s just the country can’t afford to rely on them to keep growing the economy much longer. The remedy? As the Financial Post‘s Gordon Isfeld reports, a sustained recovery in the United States, mixed with a strong dose of optimism for other advanced countries, such as Japan and those on-the-mend eurozone members. That’s the prescription being offered by TD Economics in its quarterly assessment of Canada and the U.S. and the global economy as a whole. “Economists in Canada are guilty of sounding like broken records, repeating the need for Canada’s growth to shift from relying on heavily indebted consumers to stronger exports and business investment,” TD said Wednesday. “While the process has started, U.S. economic growth looks slightly softer in the near term, making the transition uneven,” it said.

TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL project continues to shed its billing as a make-or-break outlet for Alberta’s oil sands, amid the rapid proliferation of rail-loading capacity and expectations that rival pipelines will accommodate growth in the world’s No. 3 crude deposit, reports the Financial Post‘s Peter Koven. RBC Capital Markets analysts led by Mark Friesen said Wednesday a rejection of the contentious pipeline by the U.S. government could defer 300,000 barrels a day of oil sands growth in the 2015-2017 timeframe, shaving $1.8-billion from planned capital expenditures and pushing as much as $7.8-billion in spending on oilfield services beyond 2018. The overall impact is likely to be mitigated, however, by a combination of rail and competing pipelines, and as producers such as Suncor Energy Inc., MEG Energy Corp. and Cenovus Energy Inc. plow billions into expansions of existing projects, the analysts said in a report. “If Keystone XL doesn’t go through, the projects that already have the bulk of the work done on them are going to continue,” said Brook Papau, vice-president, energy research at ITG in Calgary.

Some potentially good news for those affected by BlackBerry’s decision to cut its workforce by 40%, and for those in the Waterloo, Ont. area feeling the pain of a once-titan company’s ailing health. As the Financial Post‘s Matt Hartley reports, just a few days after BlackBerry Ltd. announced its latest round of layoffs, one of the embattled smartphone maker’s top competitors has announced plans to set up a new office in the company’s back yard. On Wednesday, the Google Inc.-owned Motorola Mobility revealed it would be establishing a new engineering hub in the Kitchener-Waterloo area, with the goal of tapping into the deep talent pool located in an around Canada’s premiere technology hub. The new office, dubbed Motorola Kitchener-Waterloo, will be located at 51 Breithaupt St. in Kitchener, and is walking distance to Google’s current Waterloo region home in the city’s Tannery Building. Currently, there are only a handful of employees at Motorola Kitchener-Waterloo — which is actually located in a shared working space with several other companies — but the company has aggressive plans for expansion.

Turns out smaller is actually better, especially for electronics retailer The Source, which has the unusual fortune of having been in the right place for a long time, reports the Financial Post‘s Hollie Shaw. While most peers in its sector are scaling back amid a prolonged period of product deflation and competition from Amazon, the Canadian chain once known as Radio Shack is seeing an upside from having a service-heavy local store format that is back in vogue with time-strapped consumers. “We are lucky in that we are what everybody wants to be these days — our heritage is the small-box store,” says Charles Brown, president of the BCE Inc.-owned chain. “There has been a shift in the way people shop, and that has been quite a positive shift for us. Our store does not have 900 [items] in one product category, but there is a curated assortment of all the top brands, and then there is somebody there to ask the basic questions and spend time with you if you want the help.” Department stores carrying consumer electronics have exited or scaled back their category assortments in the past two years, and industry leader Best Buy has closed 15 low-performing box stores and is opening smaller outlets and kiosks.

If diamonds are a girl’s best friend, then this one will be a BBBBFF. As the Financial Post‘s Peter Koven reports, it’s been a landmark week for Lucara Diamond Corp., thanks to the company’s discovery of a massive 257-carat white diamond from its Karowe mine in Botswana. It is the largest diamond found at Karowe so far, and the second to top 200 carats since the mine entered commercial production last year. Vancouver-based Lucara plans to sell the diamond in the fourth quarter. BMO Capital Markets analyst Edward Sterck estimated a sale price of about US$6-million for the stone, based on the price of US$24,000 per carat that Lucara achieved when it sold another large white diamond earlier this year. “Lucara’s plan to sell the diamond in Q4 suggests that the company might also have recovered a sufficient number of additional large/special stones to warrant a third special diamond tender,” Mr. Sterck wrote. “If this is the case, it potentially bodes well for further special diamonds to be recovered in future years.”

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